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Olympic Officials To Spectators: Don’t Tweet, Unless You Have To

We’ve heard time and time again how effective the pairing between Twitter and sports events has been, but this is possibly the first time we’ve heard from sports organizers that fans shouldn’t tweet. During a nail-biting men’s Olympic cycling race on Saturday, TV commentators found it difficult to pinpoint who was in the lead and by how much – blaming Twitter for disrupting the data.

As the Independent reports, cyclists’ bikes are fitted with a GPS chip which transmits important information about their progress to organizers and commentators. But the International Olympic Committee (IOC) says that too much tweeting during the race was the culprit for choppy GPS signals which ultimately interrupted the televised coverage.

IOC communications director Mark Adams explains that tweet should maybe be kept to a minimum in order to make sure future events go smoothly:

“We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates. But perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”

Quite a lot of the comments on Twitter in recent days have been about the spotty coverage the BBC had been providing. There had been some factual errors and gaps in coverage that viewers noticed, turning to Twitter to express their disappointment.

During the opening ceremonies, Twitter users sent a whopping 10 million tweets about the games, and retweeted a single tweet by Tim Berners-Lee over 10,000 times.